Holy J***s! Its been more than 30 days since I last updated this thread! I've finally found the time to continue this build. At this point, I have finished sleeving my cables, as per my previous post, and I got around to test fitting some parts. For those interested, here is some of the gear I've decided to cram into this case.

The white box on the lower left is one of the two RADs I plan on fitting. One is an XSPC X2 120 Rad (the double thickness one) and the other is the same rad, but the 240 version.

Also up for fitting and whatnot is the fans I got for this build. After searching for a few hours I finally found a fan I liked, but it was $27US a fan! I almost gave up on them! Luckily for me, I buy enough from Newegg that I had one of those 20% off coupons for Case Fans, and so I bought 5 of them.

As you can see, they are Gelid Fans, and the model is the Wing 12-PL version, which is the PWM, UV Reactive version of their normal 120mm fans, with a tweaked blade design. There were two major reasons for picking these fans. One, they matched the color theme perfectly. Two, the have an EXCELLENT Static Pressure rating of 2.66. In my book, they are great for Rads, although I am sure some of you guys will contend otherwise.

Anyway, step one was to test fit the 240 radiator with the Gelid fans installed on one side to see if they would mount where I wanted to mount them and still leave enough room for the E-ATX board I am also trying to squish in there. Here is a pic of the Rad and Fans mounted on the bottom of the Raven case.

Looks okay, but its cutting it pretty close. I measured the width of the board and used the standoffs as references to get a feel for the case, and the motherboard will probably just fit. Only one problem, I may have issues with wiring the 24pin ATX cable from the power supply to the board.

There is also a few issues mounting the radiator, but unfortunately for me, I forgot to take pictures of the process, since I was so excited to start building. :-/ Go figure. What I essentially had to do was center the radiator over different non-existant fan holes so that it would mount correctly. This doesn't look too hard considering how swiss-cheese-like the bottom of the case is, but it did require some finagling. I ended up just using some screws and washers after carefully marking which holes could be used to mount the radiator to get it to fit perfectly.

I also took this opportunity to mount the exhaust fan (which is on top of this particular case).

I used the included silent fan mounts to help with noise (hopefully) which is those green rubber things sticking out of the case. So far so good...

Anyway, next up is the XSPC 120mm rad I got. Along with it, I also ordered some rad mounts also made by XSPC, although I wasn't sure at the time I would actually need it. I originally planned to mount the fan vertically in the case just above the power supply where the hard drive bays usually go. This case allows me to put the boot and storage drives behind the motherboard tray so I figured I would put those back there and use the front for cooling and maybe a double 5.25 Res/Pump combo.

Anyway, I mounted the L bracket radiator mounts to the 120mm radiator for a test fit.

I'm going to use one of the hard drive trays as a base for the radiator, which required me to bend some of the tabs out of the way and make some holes.

Here it is as one unit.

I installed the fan and test fit the rad/fan combo in the bays to see how many extra bays I would have left to work with.

It turns out if I factor tubing and fittings into the equation I have two usable 5.25 inch bays to work with, which I have reserved for a Res/Pump combo. So no CD drive or 5.25 fan controller. Oh well...

The last bit of business for today is to actually mount the motherboard. Here is the board in all its glory! Turns out it is a perfect fit! I am not planning on posting again until I have some more of the parts I need to build the machine, such as the waterblock for the CPU and the Bitspower fittings I selected. Until then, this post will have to suffice. :-)

mod a fan controller in there. get some "light dimmers" (i like to call them variable voltage resistors) that look nice and put them on the side or top of the case! theres your fan controller. hope it helps you out if you want it. i've been through this before. i'm more into modding other things than computers, but i still got mine. i'm just better with the ideas than actually completing the ideas

Lol. I think I have a pretty good solution, although this motherboard has some absolutely excellent onboard fan functions. (All the plugs are PWM compatible) so I may just use that. It depends on how it turns out later after fitting everything and i begin wiring. I did get a nice brushed aluminum 5.25 fan controller before I discovered it didn't fit, but we'll see. It also depends on the temps if I'll actually need an external fan controller. Thanks for the suggestion though!

Also, I am right there with you with the light dimmers, although I might just go with a switch or something. (on or off) more to come on that later.

The time is here! Its time to watercool the bits and bobs and prep for finally assembly! Woohoo! And as you can probably tell from that statement that a lot of my watercooling parts came in!

Here are a few pics. Note that the XSPC Raystorm that I chose to cool the CPU already came in roughly around the same time as my motherboard. (3 or 4 weeks ago?)

As you can see, I went with entirely Bitspower fittings, something I have often done with builds. I love the quality of these things and they look awesome in black. I also went with Primochill 1/2ID 5/8OD UV Green tubing to handle most of my tubing needs. I have had pretty good luck with this brand in the past, so I am going for it again. And of course, to keep the water nice and germ free, some Silver Killcoil (not pictured).

The processor I went with is an i7-4770k, which many of you know is a Haswell CPU that is kind of hit or miss from an overclocking and heat perspective. I booted it up with the stock cooler earlier and it seems to run fairly average on air. Boost is 3.9 GHz and I got around 75 degrees on the stock cooler. Not great, but I have seen worse.

I installed the XSPC Raystorm with pretty much no issue. Here is a picture.

I am also going to take the opportunity to fit these memory sticks.

Now that that is all together, I am going to fit a reservoir pump combo. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a pic of the res/pump before I installed it, so here is a picture I took of the inside of the case, with the res/pump installed as I was checking for tubing clearance.

The pump is a Swiftech MCP655, which I got on ebay with the Res I purchased, which is a Frozen Q Double 5.25in Helix radiator with the cold cathode in green. It was a smashing deal at just under $100 for the set. I did some thorough closed loop testing over the kitchen sink and they work perfectly! Wooh! And as you can see from the pic above, there is just enough room for tubing and such. As you can also see from the picture, I was also planning for adding some cold cathodes to get a nice green glow.

I took a pic after all that fitting to get a feel of how rig is comming along. I test fitted the PSU cables, prewired the cold cathodes and installed the motherboard. Its a tight squeeze but everything fits.

At this point, I spent some time cutting the lengths of the tubing to work for my build. I cannot emphasize enough that NOTHING went to plan but with some ingenuity I was able to figure out a nice neat way to get everything to loop together nicely. I first did a massive test fit with all the tubing. Notice I haven't gotten a new graphics card yet, and I may not do so in the future, but I installed my old EVGA GTX 670s with XSPC Razor 670 blocks on them in SLI. Looks okay to me, although I am not sure where to go from from here.

I am a bit bummed I didn't take any interim assembly shots but it was late and I was trying to get this one thing done before going to bed. Anyway, the loop hasn't been filled yet, but test fitting is complete! Tomorrow is wiring and filling the loop, and a good old fashioned leak test.